A couple of weeks ago there was a lot of talk about comments How To Get Away With Murder’s Jack Falahee made, where he refused to say if he was gay in real life, or whether it was just his character was. Some praised him for refusing to be reductive, while others felt he was simply trying to have his cake and eat it.

You can understand the criticism, as his original comments to Out did come across more like he was trying to fudge and avoid the question than because he really believed his own point. At the time he said, “It’s been really interesting to be in the middle of the industry’s fascination with the individual, because I never thought about that growing up or when I was at acting school. No matter how I answer, someone will say, ‘No, that’s not true.’ We still live in this hetero-normative, patriarchal society that is intent on placing everything within these binaries. I really hope that — if not in my lifetime, my children’s lifetime — this won’t be a question, that we won’t need this.”

Now he’s expanded on what he was trying to say, telling Instinct, “We’re definitely making headway. The way we frame the conversation around sexuality is maybe not the best. That’s why I was adverse to answering that question.

“To answer how Jack Falahee defines his sexuality undermines what is being achieved by showing a character like Connor Walsh. Connor Walsh is unabashedly who he is because he’s confident in who he is. He doesn’t need to answer to anyone, and that’s okay.

“It’s really tough to assume that heterosexuality is the norm and that we are now forcing people to come out of closets. As soon as we can reconstruct the way that we view sexuality as a society, then this won’t be a conversation. You look at an actor who plays James Bond, and you don’t ask him if he’s gay or straight — or even the other men on my show. There’s no conversation being had about it, it just happens to be that I’m playing a gay man. So it seems really undermining to the greater cause.”

He does have a point, but he’s not necessarily getting it across particularly well. He’s right about James Bond and also that the question is only asked to him because he’s playing an LGBT character, but equally the way he talks about it does sound like he’s avoiding the issue.